December 2012

Library 24/7!

After many months of planning, we're delighted to be able to trial 24/7 opening for the December exam period. The Main Library opened on Saturday December 1st at 10am and will remain open 24/7 until Friday the 14th when we will close at

2am. We will also offer increased opening hours for the final week of exams up until December the 21st. Here is a breakdown of the opening times:

Saturday 1st December 10am opening. 24/7 until 2am on Saturday 15th. Saturday 15th Thursday 20th 7am-2am. Friday 21st 7am-9pm. Extended opening hours due in January's inter-semester break as well as Spring and Summer vacations 2013.

Please remember to bring your ID card - there will be NO CARD NO ACCESS in or out of the Library between 2am & 8am. We are insisting you bring your card for security during these times and so that we can gather stats to gauge how popular 24/7 opening is.

New Resources
You like our lists - we'd like yours
JISC Media Hub You can search for video clips, audio files or images in this comprehensive database. From images in the Design Archives to video news clips from ITN you can find material across disciplines. See our @the library blog for more info.

Queen Victoria's Journals ONLINE!

The Library's Online Reading Lists service is proving a very popular way of accessing module reading. There's been a 33% increase in visits to online list pages at the start of this semester compared with the same period last year. Online Reading Lists provide significant advantages for both students and academics. Students can use them to view the availability of books on SAULCAT, and to click straight through to e-journal articles, video feeds, ebooks and other electronic resources. Academics can use them to ensure that course resources are readily available and easily accessible. Other useful features include simple editing (allowing for changes during the course of a module) and instant stats on usage. Students: if you want to get ahead with reading for Semester 2 and we don't already have lists set up for some of your modules, let us know and we'll aim to put that right. Academics: Please send us your reading lists for next semester by 10th December (marked up with details of books to go on short loan and chapters to scan). If you want to find out more about using the service see the info here. -Colin Bovaird Academic Liaison Officer Image from Museum of Photographic Arts. You can now browse and read the scanned original pages of Queen Victoria's journals from 1832 1901. This resource also contains sketchbook illustrations and numerous essays about Queen Victoria and information about her journals. More details on our @the library blog.

Major collection of the Bronts donated to Special Collections

More Dictionaries!

We have returned dictionaries to levels 3 & 4 of the Main University Library. If you think we are missing a dictionary that you need, please let us know! Email us with the dictionary or reference work title.

New books In September of this year, the Department of Special Collections received the gift of the library and papers of former Rare Books Librarian Geoff Hargreaves. Hargreaves's collection was largely focused on his main academic pursuit: the lives and work of the Bronts. The collection numbers about 500 books and includes many early editions of the work of the Bront family which were published under their pseudonyms Currer Bell (Charlotte), Ellis Bell (Emily) and Acton Bell (Anne). It also includes later 19th century editions and modern scholarly and popular editions. Hargreaves was a keen collector and bibliographer and his goal was to collect the entire publishing history of the Bronts' titles. Other examples of popular 19th century fiction are well represented as well, including a collection of about 60 "yellow-backs," or cheap novels with bright and colourful covers designed to compete with "penny dreadfuls". Alongside this treasure trove of popular British 19th century fiction is Hargreaves's working reference collection which includes standard bibliographic reference texts, long runs of The Library and Studies in Bibliography and other resources. Hargreaves, who worked with the rare books collections in the 1970s and 1980s, passed away earlier this year and it was his wife's wish to find an institution that would take his collection as a whole and that would share it with those who were interested. St Andrews has received the first part of this collection and cataloguing efforts are already under way to make this wonderful resource accessible to all. These items will be available to request on SAULCAT for reading or teaching in the Special Collections Reading Room. -Daryl Green Acting Rare Books Librarian Books recently added to the Library catalogue include: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican modernism : the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (2001) The comedian as critic : Greek old comedy and poetics (2012) Economics : a very short introduction (2007) How to be a student : 100 great ideas and practical habits for students everywhere (2005)

See more via our New Books RSS feed.

Subject Guides We have created and regularly update guides for academic subjects and general Library help. New guides include: Remote Access to Online Resources International History and International Relations Dictionaries

Christmas in Caf 1413

Comparative Literature Referencing Software Modern Languages - general resources Visit our Subject Guides page to view all of our guides. In the caf you will find a promotion of Coffee & mince pie 1.50 or Tea & mince pie 1.30.

Also look out for our range of Christmas themed fillings on selected Urban Eat products! All the staff would like to wish our customers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and a big thank you for your support and custom throughout the year. We will be closing the caf at 8pm on Thursday 20th December and our January opening times/days can be found below.

Library caf opening from Monday 7th January:

Monday 7th - Friday 11th Saturday 12th & Sunday 13th Monday 14th - Thursday 17th Friday 18th Saturday 19th & Sunday 20th Monday 21st - Friday 25th Saturday 26th Sunday 27th 8.30am - 6pm Closed 8.30am - 6pm 2pm - 6pm* 10am - 5pm 8.30am - 8pm 10am - 5pm 10am - 7pm

*the Main Library will be closed until 2pm on Friday 18th January.
-Anna Fettes Retail Manager

Book Thieves and vandals!

Image of John Mair's Brief survey of the terraqueous globe with kind permission from Daryl Green. "In every working library, each day sees a struggle played out between order and chaos. It's a fact of life that however hard librarians work to impose order, opening the doors to users inevitably means that a measure of chaos enters in their wake. Often this is chaos at a fairly low-level: a book being absent-mindedly left on a train; the quiet of a study area being shattered by a phone ringing that kind of thing. Sometimes though, the chaos that users bring in is a bit more of a problem than this" - Colin Bovaird. The above excerpt is from Academic Liaison Officer Colin Bovaird's twopart entry for the Special Collections blog Echoes of the Vault. Visit the blog to read more about some of the ways in which the King James Library has been used and abused.

Open Access, what's the big deal?

During Open Access Week (22-28 October) the University Library held a number of events to highlight how important open access publishing is becoming, both for academic staff publishing research and for Library users accessing material. Our events culminated in "The humanities and open access: opportunities and challenges" held in Parliament Hall. Our Key Note speaker at this event was Professor Gary Hall (Coventry University and Open Humanities Press). You can view his talk, 'Why Open Access is Important for the Humanities, the University, Everyone...', and Q&A on the Library's YouTube channel. All of the academic speakers from the University have also made some of their work available in our Institutional Repository, Research@StAndrews: FullText. To read their work, click on their names:

o o o

Sarah Dillon Chris Jones Mario Aguilar

Guy Rowlands's ebook series

You can also easily view the usage stats for items in Research@StAndrews: FullText if you have submitted something yourself, or if you are interested to see the downloads or views of the articles you are reading. We are also very excited that all of the open access book series Living books about life, published by Open Humanities Press, for which Gary Hall is a Series Editor, are available on the Library catalogue. Keep up to date with Open Access news and developments. Visit our blog: OpenAccess@StAndrews.

New Online Archive Catalogue

Over the past 5 years Special Collections have been promising a new online Archive Catalogue. Our catalogue has now arrived! It contains all the records which were in the old Manuscripts Database and many more - over 50,000 records in all. You can find both manuscripts and muniments. Although not all of our collections are catalogued, and some don't yet contain detailed records, we are constantly working to add more records and also to add our old hard-copy lists into the database so the catalogue will continue to expand and improve. Read more about the Archive Catalogue on our Echoes from the Vault blog. Please try out the new catalogue and let us know what you think. -Maia Sheridan Manuscripts Archivist

Read more about the Library on our blogs:

@ the library: e-Resources Blog Echoes from the Vault: Special Collections Blog Open Access Blog